What is the elegiac tone in "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray?

The
termhas a long history. It originally, in
ancient Greece, had two meanings. The first was a
sorrowful or mournful poem
sung to the accompaniment of aulos (an
instrument
sounding like a modern oboe). The second meaning referred to the meter in which
such
songs were often written, elegiac couplets, which consist of a hexameter
followed by a
pentameter line. One of the best imitations of this form in
English is Coleridge's:

In the
hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;

In the
pentameter aye falling in melody back.

As
the form originated in songs of lament, and funerals are a common
occasion for lamentation, the
elegy evolved to become closely associated with
funerals or laments over someone's
death.

"" byis not
written in elegiac couplets, but it is set in a
graveyard and expresses
mourning for death. It may have been written on the death of Gray's

friend Richard West in 1742, but is itself a more general lament concerning
human
mortality.

The poem has a sustained melancholic
tone. It begins with the
line:

The
curfew tolls the knell of parting day

This draws a parallel between the end of day and the end of human

life in the graveyard. The elegiac tone is created by a series of terms suggesting
absence,
fading, sadness, weariness, darkness, and departure in the initial
stanzas as well as images of
solitude, twilight, and abandonment.

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